Nader Changed Everything

March 25, 2007|By BILL CURRY Bill Curry, former counselor to President Clinton, was the Democratic nominee for governor twice. His column appears Sundays on the Other Opinion page. He can be reached at billcurryct@gmail.com.

You're at a dinner party with Democrats, half snoozing through a parsing of the career of Joseph Biden, when suddenly you're overtaken by an urge to set the night on fire. But how? Two magic words: ``Ralph Nader.'' You have only to say them, sit back and watch as the flames lick the ceiling.

The issue is the 2000 presidential election. Nader ran for president four times, but Democrats' anger is over one race and one state. Nader got 97,000 votes in Florida, a state Al Gore lost to George Bush by 537 votes, or so the records say. It doesn't take a Broward County registrar to do the math. To most Democrats, it's a simple equation: no Nader, no Bush.

Nader says if he hadn't run, his base might have stayed home or gone for someone other than Gore. Besides, Gore lost his home state and former running mate Bill Clinton's to boot. And Gore's new running mate, Joe Lieberman, threw his debate and the recount as well. And then the court made off with the democracy.

Nader's critics are unmoved.

Nader is home in Connecticut this week promoting his new book, ``Seventeen Traditions,'' and a new movie, ``An Unreasonable Man.'' He'll stop at the Hickory Stick Book Store in Washington Depot today to talk about the book and at Hartford's Real Art Ways on Friday to screen the movie.

Democrats will stay away in droves. Too bad for them. The movie, a finely executed documentary, captures both the depth of the feelings Nader stirs up and the breadth of his extraordinary career. The book is something entirely unexpected: a poignant meditation on his family, boyhood and small-town upbringing.

Last December, Atlantic magazine listed Nader among the 100 most influential people in American history -- one of only three living people so cited. It's a great honor and an easy call.

Ralph Nader's the only person ever to start an entire social or political movement all by himself. Other movements -- labor, civil rights, women's, environment -- had many mothers and fathers. The consumer movement had Ralph.

In the last century, only two presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson, enacted laws as sweeping as those credited to Nader. Everyone knows about seat belts and air bags. Add prescription-drug warnings, freedom of information, clean air, clean water, safe appliances and toys, and you've just scratched the surface of Nader's legislative legacy.

No public figure stands more convincingly for the proposition that we can each make a difference; that we can and often must fight city hall. To some, these notions are quixotic. Others see in them the indispensable premises of democratic life.

Nader's intellectual legacy has proven hard for some theorists to fathom, in part because our political thinking is so cliched. Take a simple test. Are you for big government or small government? In which direction would you redistribute wealth, up or down? Would you have lobbed a missile into the Kremlin or sent flowers? And so on.

Nader shatters all such cliches. The right calls him a big-government liberal. Yet I once heard him say that if you want to know what's wrong with Washington, go to any agency at 5 p.m., where you'll be trampled to death in the rush to the doors. He's as bothered as any taxpayer by welfare, but corporate welfare bothers him most. His faith in small business and small-town democracy runs deep.

Like Robert Kennedy, Nader envisioned a politics based on the redistribution of power and opportunity, not just revenue. Both men distrusted bureaucracy. Kennedy said trying to talk to government was like shouting up a waterfall. Nader swore that if you shouted loud enough you could be heard above the roar, a belief both radical and deeply patriotic.

The rift between Nader and the Democrats began long before 2000. After the Reagan tsunami, Beltway Democrats decided to finance their rebuilding with corporate PAC money. To do it, they first had to divorce Ralph. It was the death of Nader's and RFK's dream of a new politics of empowerment.

Ralph Nader is indeed an unreasonable man. Can you get to be history's most famous shopper any other way? Healing the rift between him and those he offends may be impossible. In 2000, when Al Gore walked angrily away from Bill Clinton, he left behind their record of accomplishment. Democrats shunning Nader risk forgetting what he and they accomplished together and how much that legacy still means to us all.